Bob Simon, Veteran ’60 Minutes’ Reporter, Killed in NYC Car Crash

Bob Simon, the award winning journalist for CBS’s long-running news program “60 Minutes,” was killed this evening (Feb. 11) in a car crash in New York City. The driver of his livery cab and the driver of the Mercedes it collided with were not seriously hurt.

Simon, 73 was riding in the back of the livery cab, usually a full-size sedan, when the accident occurred.

Rescue personnel had to cut the top off the car to extract the correspondent and his driver. He likely was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident. Police have yet to confirmed details, however.

He was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

The 28-year-old Mercedes driver told The New York Post the accident was not his fault. “He swerved into me,” he said. “He hit me and he looked like he lost control of the car.”

The car Simon was riding in slammed into a median strip. He was traveling on the West Side Highway in Manhattan, a four-lane road that skirts the Western edge of the island. Cars can reach speeds of 40 mph to 50 mph during non-rush hours.

The livery cab, so-called because it’s more like a limo for hire compared with a city yellow cab, reportedly slammed into the back of the Mercedes near 30th Street at around 6:45 p.m., according to The New York Daily News.

Then it careened into a concrete median strip.

Simon began working for CBS, mostly overseas in 1969. He moved to Washington, D.C. in the early ’80s and worked as a State Department correspondent.

He rose to national attention as CBS’s Chief Middle Eastern correspondent. He was captured during the Iraq war. He was held in captivity for 40 days and wrote a book about being beaten and starved by his captors.

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TheImproper Staff

Keith Girard is Editor and Publisher of TheImproper, New York City’s cutting edge arts, entertainment pop culture and lifestyle Web magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of Billboard magazine and a reporter for the Washington Post among other media positions.